Brandeis Innovation

2019 Licensing News Winter

Winter 2019
Welcome to the winter edition of the Brandeis Office of Technology Licensing newsletter. Here, you'll find our newest inventions available for licensing, profiles of our researchers, industry events we will be attending, and news about the commercialization of our recent discoveries.
We hope you enjoy reading this. As always, you can reach out to our team with specific inquiries

Featured Technology
Microfluidic Chip Offers Hope for Faster Drug Design Processes
Produces high-resolution protein structures more efficiently than current solutions
The ability to produce high-resolution protein structures is a key process in drug design, but it is time-consuming and labor-intensive. The most commonly used method to determine protein structure is X-ray crystallography, but this method only has a 30% success rate. Life scientists and pharmaceutical companies need a way to improve and streamline the process. Prof. Seth Fraden and PhD student researcher Ali S. Aghvami have developed a solution .  The I-Corps participants and Materials Research Science and Engineering program (MRSEC) scientists have developed a microfluidic chip (MFC) that meets these demands. ( Brandeis Reference Number 2019-005 )
This liquid-handling chip offers a number of key advantages over the current generation of microfluidic chips.

Profile in Innovation

Physicist Marcelle Soares-Santos receives prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship
The  Alfred P. Sloan Foundation  has awarded Assistant Professor of Physics  Marcelle Soares-Santos  a Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. 
Soares-Santos studies the nature of the accelerated expansion of the universe using data from some of the most powerful telescopes ever built. She was part of the team that detected a neutron star merger for the first time and is currently helping to devise an entirely new method of determining the Hubble constant.
Past recipients of the fellowship include 47 Nobel Prize winners.

Recently Issued Patents & PCT Filings
We were recently issued US patents in therapeutics, genetics, food science, and materials science. Please contact us if you are interested in licensing any of these technologies!
 This invention provides a method to develop useful vaccines against human or veterinary therapeutic indications such as HIV, and to synthesize and identify them.
Inventors: Bing Xu  
This invention is a biomaterial comprised of nucleobase, an amino acid, and/or a glycoside which enables facile structural manipulation which can be derived for a multitude of biomimectic applications.
This invention provides pharmaceutical compositions used to treat various parasitic and bacterial infections in mammals. The compounds may be used alone or in combination with other therapeutic or prophylactic agents, such as anti-virals, anti-inflammatory agents, antimicrobials and immunosuppressants.
This invention discloses a new class of Cinchonium Betaines catalysts for enantioselective proton transfer catalysis with higher turnover rate and highly efficient reaction.
Inventor: Iain MacPherson, Isaac Krauss
This invention aims at the method for selecting an RNA molecule that binds to a target molecule and a tool for carrying out the method. 
Inventor: Bing Xu
This invention is comprised of peptides capable of enzymatically-induced self-assembly to which is conjugated a redox modulator. Such materials have great potentials in treatment such as  cancer cell drug resistance inhibition, immune therapy and drug delivery.
This invention presents an easier, faster, and accurate method to identify RNA-Binding Protein which shortens experiment time and has lower false-positive rates making the identification more effective than ever.
Inventor: Pengyu Hong
This invention presents a new method for de novo reconstructing glycan structures from mass spec data for the use in bio-phramaceutical design. Such method uses machine learning to learn fragmentation of rules/patterns to distinguish data and results in a lower and more efficient computation time.

Search All Our Available Technologies
Brandeis University offers a growing array of technologies available for licensing in the areas of therapeutics and diagnostics, food science and safety, research materials, and drug delivery. We also have offerings in artificial intelligence, data science, and agriculture. You can search our full database of currently-available technologies below. Please contact us for further information on any of the listed technologies.

News About Innovation at Brandeis

The Brandeis Innovation team visited Austin, Texas, to participate in the  AUTM (Association of University Technology Managers) Annual Meeting. The conference welcomed technology transfer professionals and those in related industries such as biotech, law and venture capital, from all around the globe to network and learn from the industry’s experts.
Associate Professor of Physics  Aparna Baskaran  has won a 2019 Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research from the  American Physical Society  (APS).
Soft matter consists of materials that fall between the categories of liquids and solids such as foams, gels, liquid crystals and biological structures like cell membranes and proteins.
 
Baskaran studies the unique properties of soft matter that allow it to self-assemble and form complex and changing arrangements in response to external stimuli.
Listen to the first episode of Brandeis' new podcast where scientist Matthew Headrick explains one of the most mind-blowing ideas in physics.